Out of curiousity, me living in the outskirts of Europe and all, what’s the general expectation for new hires getting up to speed? Also, what’s the expected tenure of a new hire?

I'm surprised you can even get clojure jobs outside of London, Berlin and US

eastern europe is a desert

Well, there's HealthSamurai in Moscow and Modnakasta in Kiev, but they aren't hiring much.

Helsinki (and Finland in general) is very active

there are a lot of small consultancy/project shops that use niche stuff if they can get away with it - Clojure included. They’re all around Europe but usually not at the size where they would actively look at hiring specifically for Clojure, even less remotely.

@roklenarcic it is not that bad ... https://nofluffjobs.com/backend/job/Clojure/Expert/backend/Scalac/EBKXIEZM

you will find a few more on this website

BTW I think that site is great, and every job posting should be like this

@nilrecurring I was thinking about moving to Finland 😉 (good education system)

@hubert I moved to Finland and it was probably the best decision of my life 🙂 and we're hiring on-site in Helsinki! (so this might be the occasion to move)

@nilrecurring Do you enjoy the local language?

@dottedmag I’m living in the bubble of Swedish-speaking minority (my SO is part of the minority, and I’m working for a Swedish-speaking company), so I’m not really forced to learn Finnish

That's a lucky coincidence.

Well, Stockholm is very close anyways 🙂 And thankfully the country is bilingual, so I can get all the things done in Swedish as well

I’m a native Finn but I think I’ve used more English than Finnish at work during past 3 years in a mid-sized company. I don’t think Finnish will be an issue.

@valtteri Oh, the workplace is not a problem, I'm interested in the remaining hours of the day

Yeah, unless you work in governmental stuff, where the business domain is in Finnish by definition, the language of dev teams is English anyways, given the (relatively) big amount of expats

And @dottedmag the local language is always a problem in social situations, but it again depends on the country. E.g. it would be much worse to not speak Italian in Italy

In Finland everyone and their grandma speaks perfect English

I don’t know how they pulled it off, but it’s wonderful

I felt excluded in Norway sometimes. It's not an explicit thing, but you see people sizing you up by not being able to utter a grammatically correct Norwegian phrase and switching to the "lower-status" language.

And it's pretty hard to get up to the speed on the language if the workplace's language is English and home one speaks native tongue. All I got is Duolingo 🙂

🙂 Well I know people who have actually learned Finnish. So it’s possible!

I think we don’t have that kind of ‘status’ hierarchy thing here.

I’m not located in Helsinki though.. But in a smaller city in the middle

There’s probably no hierarchy, but there is definitely an effect of switching to “the channel with the most bandwidth” when possible, I also feel it with my native language (in which I have more bandwidth and more vocabulary)

But as @valtteri said, after a while one can pick up the language with some effort. Of course it’s cognitive resources that get subtracted to whatever side project, so that’s the tradeoff

When I traveled on business in Europe, I was always impressed at how much English was spoken for business. I visited Ericsson in Germany to present my company's product and the audience was a mix of Ericsson staff from all over Europe. Two Germans in the front row exchanged something in German and the Swede sitting behind them chided them and said "English is the company language -- please don't use your local language" which really kind of shocked me!

Company where I work (until the end of this month.. I’m currently switching to full-time clj/cljs job) also chose English as the ‘official’ language even though we have majority of Finns (400) and 50 people from other countries (Denmark, Poland and Sweden).

At Software AG (German company) its the seam, english is the company language, email, wiki, tracking, everything is done in english.

Makes sense. English has nice, consistent grammar and intuitive spelling. 😛

When I worked in Norway there were no Norwegian engineers in the company until approximately a year from the time I joined.

What company did you work at?

In the Netherlands it's also very common to have the code and documentation is English. We also have some non Dutch employees, which have a hard time learning Dutch, cause we mostly talk English.